Strange Squeeze: Taking Charge of Change, Staying True to Mission

As new semesters begin to supplant
the old, and as students enroll, I look about me at the sea of options
available to them and wonder at their wealth:

How does one know how or when to dip
into which educational opportunity these days, and to what effect?

When I was in secondary/high school,
the lines were fairly clear that separated me and my teen-age cohort from the
older college kids. And at that time, oh-so-long ago and far away in the
academic administrative mind, the community college was still a fairly new
idea; it provided an option that was at once academic and vocational, usually
to people who did not or would not have plans to pursue theoretical or academic
pursuits, particularly at the typically more expensive university.

The community college of long ago
was an open-door answer to people who needed a new chance. It offered easy
entry to the timid or the job-seeking, the burned-out and the curious, the
directionless and dismayed as well as the vocationally directed and determined.

But now, we have community colleges
in a strange squeeze, it seems.

In our community college district,
we have one institution that married itself some ten years ago to the local
elementary and high school district to form an Early College High School
(ECHS), part of this century’s movement to, as California Department of
Education documents read, “allow pupils to earn a high school diploma and up to
two years of college credit in four years or less...(within) autonomous schools
that blend high school and college into a coherent educational program.”

Originally an initiative proposed
and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, our local ECHS was to “serve
the underserved,” primarily first-generation graduates, locals who would be the
first in their families to finish high school and then attend college.

It was a grand idea, and the hope
was that our local school would spawn the success reported in 2009 by the
American Institutes for Research (AIR), which held that ECHS graduates were far
more likely than were their peers to go on to “regular” universities and then
attain BA, BS, and even graduate degrees. Our local ECHS has only 9 teachers,
fewer than 250 students, and federally-mandated free lunch for more than half
of its attendees, more than 70 percent of whom are of Hispanic origin. In fact,
the informational PrepScholar Website reports that most of California’s “homogeneous
schools” are largely Hispanic, particularly interesting to me in an area that
has the largest population of Vietnamese outside Vietnam, for instance.

But are the ECHSists really going on
to succeed in university? I continue to wonder this, as I see that their SAT
scores are typically below those of most other California students, and their “critical
reasoning” and interpretation of what they must either read or calculate remain
beneath the United States norm.

Perhaps these ECHSists are looking
for one of the other new options for education that fuse the community college
into the university?

Indeed, right in the same city as is
our local ECHS, a rather large and prominent community college that is in the
same district as is the one that offers co-curricular credit to its ECHSists,
is planning to grow into a “full-fledged university” that will offer four-year
degrees.

I have seen this latter trend
developing as I read and travel: Florida State Colege at Jacksonville, for
instance, has been re-named from Florida Community College at Jacksonville, “as
it offers a greater number of four-year bachelor's degrees than traditional
two-year colleges.” And, according to an Inside HigherEd report, the number of
states permitting institutions that once offered only associate degrees to
offer bachelor degrees leapt from 11 to 21 in eight years, as of 2013. Not just
Florida, then, but Michigan, Maryland, and Virginia, are among the many that
have joined the move.

But I have two questions, at least,
about these trends:

First, is there some sort of
"mission creep" going on here, wherein neither the high school nor
the university knows any longer where we as the community college lie, separate
and distinct, education-oriented, meeting our students’ demands and needs as
they change, and changing with our students more rapidly and readily than can
either the behemoths that are our primary-secondary Departments of Education or
the Byzantine labyrinths that comprise our state college and university
systems? I wonder if our own original mission has dissolved as the respite for
the rejected or the curious, the job-seeker or the want-to-make-up-for-the
lost. Perhaps we should ask ourselves this, as new semesters begin and
economically distressed and academically excited unite at our institutions’
doors.

Second, I wonder: as I have done for
many years, should education be perhaps a continuum of knowledge acquisition
rather than a sequence of administratively defined stepping stones? I remember
when I was in high school a young man who was brilliant in math, who understood
concepts and consequences, who imagined the utility of what was in our
textbooks as applicable across disciplines. This same boy had trouble
expressing himself in speech or writing; his grammar was terrible, his
vocabulary minimal. In my same class was another boy, a sensitive musician, who
wrote poetry and whose essays were always well presented, but who had great
difficulty in forcing himself to do math in any way. It seemed to me at the
time that instead of calling both of these fellows sophomores, as the school
did, it might have been better to put the math whiz together with others of his
ilk, no matter their age, and to have placed the poet with others of his kind,
so that both might progress in their chosen fields. Too, the anti-math artsy
fellow could have been grouped with others who shared his math anxiety,
together to overcome that anxiety with a teacher who knew how to obliterate
obstacles. The communication-challenged boy should have been, I thought,
encouraged to read about math and science and then write about that, before
being required to analyze the literature laid out in his English books. If
schools cared less for age and more for the mind, might this work? Might it
lead to a new sort of mission that need not creep?

We at the community college are, as
the League for Innovation continues to state at its website, “the crucible of
change,” with change all around us, with stresses and strains pulling us in
varying directions, we must take charge of change, decide what our mission is,
not allowing others to creep in and making new options for people with varying
skills in all fields.